Centrifuge
by Javan Ryder
Summary: 'Round and 'round they go. Buffy/Angel, post-S3. AU.


A/N: And now, my second effort at this thing. This one is AU in the sense that it disregards most of everything after the S3 finale. I wrote it before I started on S4, and anyway, I haven't managed to get very far into that season (Spike has yet to win my affection as a romantic interest for Buffy, even though I'm very fond of the character, and Riley McBoring can just GTFO, thank you very much).

So. Anyway. If you're attached to actual canon, this probably isn't for you.

* * *

_"Buffy the Vampire Slayer was, is, and always will be Angel's soulmate. She knows it, and he knows it, and though she has tried to move on, all other men walk in the sunlight. Angel is her shadow side, the true other half of her."  
_

_-Jeff Mariotte, The Angel Casefiles, published 2002._

* * *

Angel leaves very little behind.

There is nothing of his in her home except for the jacket, fraying at the edges, and nothing in his mansion but dust and darkness. Three years in Sunnydale and nothing to show for it, nothing more than what there is of him in a mirror, and Buffy walks the empty hallways of his mansion only once in the first months that follow his departure but once is enough.

His absence in mirrors used to mean the presence of him, but now it is only more absence; nagging and unhealed, like a licked wound.

There was no goodbye because it needed to be this way, a clean break; he walks out of the picture into smoke and nighttime and Buffy is stuck where she is while the sun crawls up and the wreckage recedes. It is cruel parallel to the conflict that is them; the dichotomy between their lives and the irreconcilable differences that led to their split.

But the break is anything but clean, and pieces of them cling like bits of tissue to the shrapnel of what they were, now left scattered in shared memories.

That is all he leaves, when he is gone; the echo of his touch, of his voice, of how the smooth line of his jaw felt under her hand, and the dark of his eyes in the shadow of sunlight.

She wonders, touching the scorched place on the floor where the portal once stood, if it is this way for him.

* * *

The jacket gets older, and older. It hangs on her shoulders and the seams begin to split, and the cuffs fray, and the leather fades. And she wears it less.

Where she took comfort in its familiarity and its echo of him right at first, it becomes a scar as the months pass; an ugly reminder of what they were and what they are not allowed to be.

So, it finds a comfortable place in her closet, shoulders shaping over a sagging hanger and sleeves hanging empty and all of it pushed off to the far side where it is out of the way and unseen, as gone as she can make it without tossing the whole thing out. She can't quite bring herself to do that, and _still._

It is his ghost in her life, and she does not need ghosts. The world still turns in the absence of them.

* * *

The first reunion should be the hardest, but it is not; she is bitter, he is distracted, and they bicker for a while and then they don't speak at all and part ways with all the coldness and severity of their last goodbye (or lack thereof).

The second reunion waits another year and this one is fine until his benign observation – _"I miss you," _innocent and stated simply, disarming in every way with its accompanying brush of his hand against hers, altogether innocuously unintentional and brutally provocative.

They can only orbit each other so long before they collide, as they do now, a tangle of lips and limbs and fingers strung through hair and hands bunched in clothing, whispered words for each other's ears alone twining in the night and it cannot be more than this brief contact if he wants to keep his grounding soul – but this is enough, still.

They soak in each other and in guilty, hunted gazes until they fall asleep. And they wake when the sun rises and brings reminders of what they cannot be. And this time she is the one to steal away, into sunlight, where he cannot follow.

* * *

By the third reunion, they look almost the same age.

"How are you?" Angel asks, hunched in his overcoat, hands jammed into his pockets to keep them from her, and she does that nervous arm cross he's so familiar with and looks around at his home with perhaps uncharacteristic interest.

"Um." Buffy pushes back her hair, exhales. "Good. Busy." At his lifted eyebrow she deigns to clarify, "Demons, apocalypses, big bad things in the dark. The usual."

"Oh." He eyes her until, finally, she meets his stare across the ten or so steps spanning between them. "Right."

"If you ever get asked to be the Slayer, say no," she goes on, verging on rambling now. "The hours are terrible. No vacation benefits, awful insurance. I don't even have dental."

He just looks at her. Slanted candlelight paints streaks of gold into her hair, softens up the lines of her face until she looks again like the fifteen-year-old he first met.

"Sorry," she mumbles, and toes the floor with her shoe. "Just – making conversation. Or trying to." She glances at the door like it's a life raft, yearning. "I should go."

"I wish you wouldn't," he says in a rush, an unintentional stumbling of words stemming from a break in the dam of his composure. Buffy smiles at him, a little bitter, a little sad.

"That never stopped you," she says, and leaves quietly, keeping the knob twisted as she closes the door so that it does not make a sound.

* * *

It never really stops.

They get over each other in the sense that they do not _dwell _on it, their failed attempt at love. They are adults with responsibility and maturity and individuality and they go on because they have to and they can.

But it only takes the spark of one reunion, one encounter, and they are jerked back like puppets on strings to the ties of their past. Brief contact, a lingering look; in those few moments they are slaves to it, to that which they cannot seem to bury.

He loves her so much; love that makes him tremble, love that pushes all sense of self to the background, and everything he is just wants to keep her safe. Even if that means keeping her from him.

It is selfless love, most of the time, but sometimes it is less.

* * *

"I'm over you," she reminds him, insistent, though the heat of the reminder is dampened somewhat by the fact that she's murmuring it against his mouth between kisses, her hands strung through his hair. Time has passed and new crises have presented themselves, but this, well. He still knows all these steps.

"I know," he replies agreeably, and reassures himself with the promise that this will be over (again) just as soon as the sun steps back into the office.

* * *

She looks tired.

"Think it'll ever get easier?" she asks, turning a relic from his desk over in her hands. "This, I mean. Um." Her eyes flick to his briefly, then away again. "Seeing each other."

"Yes," Angel tells her. And then: "No."

"Maybe," she corrects, gently.

"Yeah."

She puts the item, a small vase, back on his desk. "I have… another life, now. So do you."

"True," he says.

"All about the monosyllabic answers today?" she quips, and then a shadow crosses her eyes that he can't pin down, some distant flicker of memory.

"It'd be better to just stay away," he replies softly, shifting in his coat. "Better for both of us."

"I'm trying," she reminds him.

So tired. There are dark circles like bruises under her eyes. He wants to ask her to tell him about it, what's wrong, how she really is, and is everyone okay? But the questions are choked out before he can ask them and he finds himself saying instead, "So we try harder."

Her mouth forms a tense smile, the lines of her freezing solid in dissatisfaction. "Okay."

* * *

She doesn't see him for two years after that. It's been seven now since he first left.

"I'm leaving Sunnydale," she tells him softly, pacing a path in his floor, hands clasped restlessly behind her back. "I don't know for how long."

Angel regards her impassively from his place in the shadows of the office, all tired eyes and resignation. "Where are you going?"

"I can't say," she replies, and focuses on a place on the ceiling fixedly. "It's complicated."

"Usually is," Angel quips without humor, looking away.

"I might not come back," she adds, so soft that she wonders if he'll hear it while also knowing that he will.

Neither of them say it – that _I love you _hanging in the air between them, undying, unchanging, timeless – but Angel steps out of the dark and folds her in his arms, and she presses her face into the crook of his neck and her hands into the spaces between his shoulder blades and they stay like that for a long time.

* * *

The world turns on in the absence of them, and they both put the other out of their mind, but they never forget.

It is some decade and a half later when he finally sees her again, and she is older and scarred and tired and broken, but she steps into the shadow of his space and they could be back in the dark alleyway where they first met again.

She touches her forehead to his, her hand to his jaw; his hand shapes around her hipbone, the other folding against the small of her back, coaxing her close and closer.

"Tell me you love me," she says, distracted and bitter and purposeless; her request is some misshapen plea for a scrap of what they had, whatever might be left here in the rubble of them. The shadow dimming her eyes crowds out the years, shields this singular moment.

When he looks at her, he sees the markers and time and the spaces between them – she is fifteen and scared and bent under the weight of her new purpose; she is seventeen and beautiful and certain and dogmatic; she is twenty-five with circles under her eyes and exhaustion in every line of her.

He is unchanging, sculptural in the passage of time that has left its marks on her.

There will always be this split, this damning dichotomy.

But he says:

"Always."

* * *

A/N: Someday I promise to write something longer and with, y'know, some semblance of a plot. But anyway. Thanks so much for reading!


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